I’ve updated my Apple iPhone to a 6S and adjusted the custom iPhone backup location on my external HDD. This time I’ve enabled the Encrypt iPhone backup feature in iTunes.
Apple does not backup important data to transfer to a new phone if you don’t encrypt your backups. Things like:
- Account passwords
- WiFi passwords
- Health app data
- HomeKit data
iCloud backs up this data fine, but with only 5GB of iCloud storage, I wanted to backup then restore my 64GB device locally.
The encryption is strong by 2016 standards. You cannot restore a backup without the password. Aside: Obviously the FBI (and NSA) can now hack your iPhone but that’s not the use case here.
If your external HDD is ever lost or stolen, you’ll be glad that your iPhone backup on it is encrypted. Just do it.
Oh! And pick a decent password to encrypt it. Not something your already used on FaceBook, LinkedIn and every other website on the planet. You are using unique passwords and a password locker by now, right? This is 2016 after all.
